Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’

As the ‘finest’ of Pater’s imaginary portraits, ‘Apollo in Picardy’ is also one of the most studied. Rather than add to this scholarship by chasing down yet more of its allusions to the classical, this chapter revels in its complex and careering fictions to examine instead its contribution to, and definition of, classicism. Doing this demands bringing these fictions into dialogue with Pater’s work on Greek sculpture, and its classicism into dialogue with the Victorian Bible, the ‘Gothic Revival’, and what we now call ‘Romanticism’. By exposing the mechanisms by which the belatedness of modernity and ancient Greece and Rome are made to relate in Pater’s prose, the chapter sees this prose as a possible model for classical art history and reception studies today.

Apollo · Astrobiology · Biology · Physics · Zoology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical Architecture and Urbanism · Historical Art and Culture Studies